Revkin is back in his usual rut.

Under pressure from other industrialized countries at talks here on global warming, the Bush administration announced on Tuesday that it had signed an agreement with a coalition of energy companies to build a prototype coal-burning power plant with no emissions.

Well, no, pressure isn't the issue.

The project, called FutureGen, has been in planning stages since 2003.

It's no secret and has long been anticipated. What galls the climate nutters is that it is a good example of the sort of things we can do that are effective rather than merely pious.

Environmental advocates at the talks criticized the announcement, saying it was intended to distract from continuing efforts by the American delegation to block discussion of new international commitments to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that scientists link to global warming.

"You are watching 163 nations do an elaborate dance to try to make progress when the United States is sitting in the middle of the road trying to obstruct," said Alden Meyer, a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has long criticized the Bush administration's climate approach.

See, those wankers aren't environmental advocates, they are political activists who have a purely political agenda. They aren't interested in policies that would help the environment, they are interested in policies that empower a bureaucracy to control economies. They always have been. They used to have other excuses, used to be class warriors, but that fizzled and they switched to being climate hysterics.

They are right to be alarmed, to fear and hate Bush. They suffered a great defeat and a huge loss of power and influence when the world prospered and the class war was made redundant. It's beginning to look like a repeat as it becomes ever more obvious that environmental quality has been improving apace with growing prosperity, and that their great hope, Kyoto, is a farce. It mandates trivial reductions, for just a few countries, who aren't hitting even those modest targets, while suffering economic harm and thoroughly trashed energy policies. And now Bush is presiding over a steady steam of announcements of smarter treaties, effective initiatives that combine emissions savings with poverty reduction in developing countries, and technological initiatives that have the potential to actually make a difference, unlike Kyoto type approaches.

Real environmentalists don't care who does it, they care what is done. Real environmentalists don't care if the red-pretending-to-be-green old timers have their political agenda ruined or not, they care if the environment is helped. That's the issue here. It may be galling for those who are all puckered up to hate Bush, but the things his administration has been doing - such as Methane To Markets, Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate Change, and technology initiatives such as zero emissions coal fired power plants - are much better than the Kyoto stuff.

Revkin offers this spin.

The talks here are just one chapter in an international effort to rein in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases that began in Toronto in 1988 at a conference on the changing atmosphere. Ever since then, climate scientists, with widening consensus, have linked a global warming trend to increasing levels of those gases in the atmosphere.

One of the main participants in that 1988 conference was the Soviet Union. It chaired the "Working Group II on impacts", one of three working groups. The others were chaired by th UK and the US. In 1989 everything changed. The wall came down and the trend to dismantle the excessive bureaucracies of past decades accelerated. The failures of that approach were pretty clear, especially to those who had lived with the harsher versions of it.

One aspect of the apparently insane behavior of Kyoto proponents and UN supporters in general is that they are clinging to that dead past. They have to since they have no future. It is the last redoubt of the anti-capitalist totalitarian dream. But this is why they deserve to be dismantled. They are willing to abuse the environment to save themselves, while claiming to champion the environment. That sort of double-speak deceit is a large part of what is so repellent about their dream, and what was so repellent about the whole socialist/soviet/whatever period and the various deformed governments that were spawned. They don't walk the talk.

A pox on all their houses. Bush and company are short on environmental piety and are fearsome political enemies of those old worlders clinging to the dead past, but on environmental issues Bush & Co. have quietly put the puck in the net while their political opponents have been doing pirouettes and occasional prat falls. Bush may not skate well, but what matters is scoring not skating. I'll take an ugly win over a stylish loss any day.

Environmentalists should distance themselves from those losers. Climate issues are too real and too important to be used as a tool to prop up the fortunes of failing political ideologies. This isn't going to go away like the nuclear winter hoax. It's all tangled up with energy and so economics, development, ag and food, and everything.

Update:

The anti-environmental stance of the UCS noted above is shared by others. The UCS spokesman said:

Environmental advocates at the talks criticized the announcement, saying it was intended to distract from continuing efforts by the American delegation to block discussion of new international commitments to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that scientists link to global warming.

"You are watching 163 nations do an elaborate dance to try to make progress when the United States is sitting in the middle of the road trying to obstruct," said Alden Meyer, a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has long criticized the Bush administration's climate approach.

Less than a quarter of US senators, mostly Democrats but also including the usual Republican moderates who frequently join Democrats, are trying to use the press to advance their political objectives by publishing an "open letter".

It urges the Bush administration to fulfil what the senators say is a legal obligation to play a constructive role in talks about global action to combat climate change beyond 2012.

"The US should, at a minimum, refrain from blocking or obstructing such discussions... since it would be inconsistent with its ongoing treaty obligations," it says.

Last week, chief US negotiator Harlan Watson said he was opposed to any negotiation about imposing Kyoto-style limits on US emissions.

The US is not blocking discussions. This is a false argument intended to evade the significance of the administration's statements. When Wilson says the US is opposed to any negotiation about imposing Kyoto-style limits on US emissions that doesn't mean that there are no other better ways to engage in global action to address climate change. Indeed, they have proposed better ways and taken action with the other major players in the world to develop coordinated approaches. But Kyoto style treaties are not among those better approaches.

The Bush folks are right. As noted in Winter Is Coming Kyoto is a farce, a bad idea that is destructive to the nations engaged and that seems set to result in greatly increased emissions.

The problem for the British Government is simply that expensive gas was not something it bargained for when it formulated its energy policy back in 1997. This was to be an impeccably green policy. By 2010, Britain was to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions (principally CO2) to just 80 per cent of their 1990 levels - nearly double the cut required by the Kyoto treaty. Even today, Mr Blair still likes to pose as the greenest of world leaders, the man with a mission to salvage something from the wreck of Kyoto. . .

What ministers had overlooked was that, yes, prices can go up as well as down. . .

Until this year the Government has been living in la-la land, imagining that within five years a tenth of Britain's electricity requirements could come from "renewable" sources like wind power. This is pure fantasy. Wind farms simply cannot deliver enough energy, not least because the wind doesn't blow every day.

To meet its target, the Government would have to turn the whole of Wales, and probably Scotland, too, into a wind farm. . . Hmm. That just leaves coal and oil - both of which mean, er, increased CO2 emissions.

The political needs of those Democrats and Republican moderates are irrelevant. Their ideas don't help the environment and often cause environmental harm. They've painted themselves into a corner by failing to take the environment seriously, instead just using environmental concerns to advance their agenda without actually benefitting the environment. They talk loudly but carry a small stick, to paraphrase the inverse of a once famous formulation. Ignore the noise.